Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/65

The friends that fame brought him used to question him sometimes on his experiences, ambitions, sufferings and dreams during those twenty years of "provincial solitude," but they got no reply. One of them tells us that he was dumb about his past. He unbosomed himself on that subject to no one, not even to his wife. Famous men, especially those who have become so late in life, have a very natural inclination to tell the story of their years of obscurity, as though they wanted to give them a share in the sun of their renown and in the presumed immortality of their works. This inclination did not show itself in Rameau. No doubt he judged that all these people who clamoured for his reminiscences were asking but for idle words. And I am convinced that if he had replied somewhat as follows: "What did I do in those twenty years when I was the most obscure of French musicians? I created the science of Harmony, and I learnt to compose music the like of which has never been heard," these words would have summed up, in his eyes, everything in the history of his personality that deserved to have any importance attached to it either by himself or by the world. In the same spirit, Descartes, if questioned on what had happened to him in Holland, in his "tub" to which he had retired might have replied, "I invented mathematical analysis and a system of the universe." It is their intellectual power that has led me to connect the names of these two men. Their temperaments also lend themselves to association. They are both solitaries. And they are not so from melancholy or natural misanthropy, but as the result of the extraordinary force of thought and imagination, which holds them fast in the dream and continual pursuit of the work to be created—